Kids' Hospital Provides Relief

Christ Hospital Unit Set To Open

November 10, 1996|By Pamela Cytrynbaum, Tribune Staff Writer.

Laura Lair sits perched atop a dingy window vent, squeezed in beside the hospital bed of her 5-year-old son Aaron, while his 2-year-old sister Sheridan looks at picture books laid out at the end of the bed.

And so it has been for critically ill children and their families at Christ Hospital and Medical Center in Oak Lawn for years: cramped rooms, intensive care beds stacked in close rows with little room for parents, 6-year-olds receiving transfusions next to 18-month-olds recovering from brain surgery, hallways clogged with ventilators and gurneys, parents sleeping in waiting room chairs and traipsing up or down four floors in their pajamas for a shower.

Until now.

Christ Hospital officials Sunday begin a weeklong program of events celebrating the Nov. 20 opening of Hope Children's Hospital--the first children's hospital to be built in the Chicago area in nearly 30 years, and the only one of its kind south of Chicago. It also houses The Heart Institute for Children, a nationally known teaching and research center in pediatric cardiovascular disease and specializing in open heart surgery.

Hope Hospital is a sparkling four-story, 112,000 square-foot, 60-bed facility that will include 45 spacious private inpatient rooms complete with showers and state-of-the-art equipment, rehabilitation rooms and a 15-bed pediatric intensive care unit. There are playrooms for patients and their siblings. There also are high-tech drug dispensers that look like ATM machines, which keep a record of exactly who gave what to whom, and when.

The colors are soothing, and the counters and windowsills were designed from a child's perspective, so they are thigh-level on an adult, but just right for a kids'-eye-view, explained Dr. Rabi Sulayman, chairman of Christ Hospital's Department of Pediatrics and the ebullient engine behind the $25 million facility.

"No procedures will be done in the rooms," Sulayman said. "The kids will know their rooms are their safe havens. When they're in their rooms, they know nobody is going to hurt them." All medical procedures will be done in a nearby "procedure room."

Wrenching testimony by parents in 1994 helped persuade a state planning board to approve the project.

"It was so crowded, you had to stand much of the time," Bolil said. "It was frightening when you would hear all the noise right next to you, like when someone went into respiratory distress."

It was time "for a revolution," according to 54-year-old Sulayman, the department chairman.

Although Christ Hospital already was home to some of the world's best pediatric specialists, its current pediatric facility was not "child and family friendly," he said.

Fundraising ranging from large donations to bake sales brought in $7 million of the $10 million hospital officials hoped to raise.

The children's hospital, located just next door to Christ Hospital, is expected to treat 5,000 pediatric in-patients each year and get about 60,000 visits for pediatric out-patient services.

"I saw it in my mind 20 years ago, and now, here it is," said Sulayman. "There is no question, if the family is comfortable in their surroundings, there is an increase in the healing process.

"When I first came here 20 years ago, it was horrible. Parents were only allowed to visit their children for one hour a day. The nurses were not allowed to give out any information to them. It was a painful experience to see."

The idea was to create a state-of-the-art children's hospital that would in turn serve as a model for the nation.

"There are no children's hospitals that I know of in the U.S. that have been built around families and children," he said.

Hospital officials asked families in the nearby community whose critically ill children had been to Christ Hospital how they could make their stays more comfortable, Sulayman said. Nowhere to sleep, nowhere to shower, nowhere to play were the repeated complaints.

There is now a cafeteria, a chapel, indoor and outdoor play areas and a teen lounge with video games.

There are ceiling-high rotating columns in each room, which will keep the tubes and other equipment in one place.

The private rooms in the new facility mean parents can sleep comfortably in recliners beside their children. They also mean that when one child goes into some form of distress, the families of everyone else won't have to be rushed out, which is what happens now. More importantly, hospital officials said, other children will no longer have to lie helplessly a few feet away, seeing and hearing everything.

Parents with critically ill children have enough to deal with, said Aaron's mom, Laura Lair, of Clarendon Hills. It happens so fast, she said.

"In February, I brought Aaron in for dehydration. Within a day he was diagnosed with leukemia. The following day, he was in chemo(therapy). Three months later, he was in remission," Lair said.

Since then, Aaron has come to Christ Hospital every nine weeks for chemotherapy treatments, plus lengthy stays when he has had complications, Lair said. Aaron has about a year more of two-and-three-day treatments, and the new facility will make all the difference.

Aaron is looking forward to the television and VCR in every room, and the brand new toys in playrooms on every floor.

"It's light and spacious and the colors are bright," said Lair. "I'm really excited about the private rooms with their own showers. And it's important to me to know that they listened to the parents."